


Fury's Stable

by ladyarcherfan3



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, dealing with the fact that Joe is a nasty person in this au too, riding stable au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 08:19:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5736451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyarcherfan3/pseuds/ladyarcherfan3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa  manages Citadel Stables, dealing with a boss who is certainly dangerous, picky horse owners, escapee minis, and now a new barn hand that she has no information on.  Just a day in the life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fury's Stable

 

The barn was blissfully quiet for the moment.  Grain buckets rattled against stall walls from time to time, and the steady grinding sound of numerous horses eating their breakfast filled the air.  Furiosa gave a small nod of satisfaction, grabbed the feed cart and started back down the aisle to the grain room.  She refilled the cart for the evening feed - topping off the buckets of the sweet feed, senior blend, oats and all the SmartPak strips of supplements for forty five horses and ponies.  Each one had their own ration, and boarders got fussy about how their horse was treated, so knowing each was vital both for the horse’s sake and her own sanity when dealing with clientele.  It was only a tiny part of the responsibilities she held as the manager for Citadel Stables.

 

She’d been there for almost twenty years now, working up from barn hand and instructor to manager.  Before that, she’d been a student, taking lessons and trading weekend work for board or show fees.  The stable owner, Colonel Joseph Moore (retired), had made a decent pension from the military, and then managed to make it big in real estate.  So naturally, he decided to open up a riding stable.  He knew next to nothing about horses, and had relied on his line of managers and instructors to keep things profitable.  Despite his lack of any useful skills around a horse, Furiosa had eventually noticed he spent an inordinate amount of time around the barn, and seemed to watch a number of the young female students and instructors in particular.  She had fallen into that list for a number of years, dodging unwanted touches and skittering away from troubling gazes. When he decided a holiday party not long after she was made manager was the place to make a move and grope her in a shadowy corner, she had tactfully let him know that she’d remove his hand and any other offending body part if he tried that with her or any of the students, instructors, boarders, or barn hands under her watch.  

 

Furiosa then made it a point to never let him alone anytime he was on the property, shadowing him as she went about her tasks.  Joe eventually stopped hanging around the barn, but had promised that if it even looked like she slipped up as manager, he’d have her fired and banned from the property.  It was a significant enough threat to make her even more focused than she was before, both at work and in her limited spare time.  There was no hard proof that she could get her hands on yet, but she suspected that he’d molested at least a few of the young women who frequented the barn.  But once she had that proof, she was going to go to the police, get the barn taken away from him, and ban him from the property.  It would be a giant middle finger from her to him to take his flourishing business and the targets of his predatory attentions away.  But she just didn’t have the proof yet.  And ten years of work, fighting back to top form in every aspect of her life after losing her arm, and loving every single detail of the barn, the horses, the clients, only made her want to kick him as far away as possible.  It was more her barn than his.  

 

Outside the barn, she heard the tractor pull into it’s parking place and then turn off; Capable and Toast, the two main instructors and trainers, back from checking the water tanks and putting hay out in the paddocks, were laughing about something as they made their way to the office.  Cheedo and Dag were already there, having shown up in the middle of feeding to help with the ponies.  They were both a bit too old to be called barn rats at sixteen and seventeen, but they still showed up on the weekends and throughout the summer if they had lessons or not, and tried to be useful.  The four of them raised a lively chatter.  

 

Furiosa paused by the stall door with a plaque reading WAR RIG.  Her big boned, black warmblood mare had the tongue tangling registered name of Vienna's Riggalettia, but it hardly suited her.  When Furiosa had first tried the mare, her best friend Val had dubbed the big horse the War Rig, and the name stuck.  

 

Finished with her grain, the mare stuck her nose through the feed slot and sniffed Furiosa’s offered fingers.  “Yeah, no treats yet, spoiled lady,” she said and rubbed the soft muzzle.  “After you work, maybe.”  

 

“Furi, you need help?” Toast leaned out of the office door, the lesson list already in hand.  

 

She shook her head to the question and stepped into the office with the rest of them, sitting down behind her desk.  Cheedo and Dag were on the couch in the corner, leaning over their phones and giggling hysterically, shoulders pressed together.  Toast grabbed a chair and propped her foot up on the desk as she went over the lesson schedule on the clipboard.  Capable had another clipboard and was at the whiteboard near the door, writing out a list of names under the header: FARRIER LIST.

 

“Okay, do you want the news, or the chores list first?” Furiosa asked as she double checked her email and phone to make sure no new messages had filtered in during the hour she’d been feeding horses.  

 

“News!” Cheedo chirped, and shoved her phone into a pocket.  

 

“Chores!” argued Dag.  “Then we can forget to be miserable while we get the news.  And then be miserable again when we actually do the chores.”  

 

“Watch it, or I’ll have you scrubbing the mash pony stalls again.”  The oldest ponies couldn’t chew hard feed anymore, and were fed mash instead.  They tended to be messy, and soupy feed got spilled everywhere.  

 

“We just did that yesterday!” Dag protested.

 

Toast snorted.  “Should be easy then.  And it has to get done regularly, ‘specially when it gets hot.”

 

“Is Angharad coming in today?”  Capable finished at the board and joined the rough circle, resting her shoulders against the bookshelf.  

 

Furiosa shook her head.  “That’s part of the news.  She started having contractions last night, text me to say that she wouldn’t be in unless something changed, but not to worry.  She’d update me when she could.”  

 

Capable bounced a little.  “Oh, baby soon, maybe?”  

 

“I’m sure we’ll be the first people she tells,” Furiosa rolled her eyes good naturedly at the younger woman’s enthusiasm.  But it was accurate.  Angharad didn’t have any family, and the baby’s father wasn’t in the picture (Furiosa had so many fears and suspicions about it, but Angharad refused to talk to her about the subject), so the small cluster of people in the stable office made up her family.  She had taught and rode until her belly got too big to be safe on horseback, and then she’d taken over in the office, relieving Furiosa of part of that duty.    

 

“In other news,” she continued, “Val is coming next week to run a clinic, and yes, Toast,” she added as the other woman sat up straight, “I am working your lesson schedule out so you can have a time slot again.  No worries.”

 

“Yes!”  

 

“Lastly, Joe decided to get rid of all but one of the part time barn hands, and just hired one full time guy to be the all around barn help. That means a few more stalls for us day to day, but it also will free us up a bit to have someone steadily on hand.”  

 

Capable raised her hand a little.  “Who is on part time yet?”

 

“Nux.  And I expect continued professional behavior from you when your boyfriend is working here, and the same from him.”

 

Capable blushed but nodded.  The two had only been going out officially for a few weeks, after he’d shaken a rather bad bunch of friends.  Furiosa hadn’t been keen on the kid to begin with, but he’d sorted himself out and was a good hand around the barn.  

 

“So who’s full time?” Toast wondered.  

 

Furiosa bit back a frustrated sigh.  “This is the fun bit.  Joe hired him, interview and everything.  I’ve never even seen him.  I don’t even know his name.  Angharad just left me a message and said that the new guy had passed his background checks and the rest, but didn’t bother to tell me his name, either.  He starts tomorrow.”

 

There was a beat of silence as the girls took the news in.  

 

“Don’t worry about it.  If he turns up and gives me even a hint of a creeper vibe or anything, I’ll boot him off the property.”  Furiosa picked up a list and pointed to Cheedo and Dag.  “Okay, you two, after turn out, water buckets need to come down and get scrubbed out.  Capable and Toast, after stalls, we’ll work Raliegh, Stormy and Dare.  Keeper should be here by then, so Capable, you’ll deal with the farrier list, cuz Toast and I have students.  We’ll go from there.”  

 

“Ready, set, go,” Toast said as she stood and stuck the lesson list up next to the white board.  “Are you two turning out ponies or not?” she asked Cheedo and Dag as they turned their attention back to their phones.  

 

The rest of the day rolled out as much as Furiosa expected.  They got horses turned out and stalls cleaned in time for a quick lunch.  Capable had to cut her ride time a bit short as Keeper and her little red van full of horseshoes, nails, iron and a portable forge rolled in early; Stormy had just needed a tune up before an afternoon lesson, so it worked out.  Dag and Cheedo finished the buckets, rode their own horses, and then helped prep lessons the rest of the day before heading home.  Lessons rolled in and out, horses were brought back in and fed, watered and hayed.  It was a fairly typical, uneventful day.  

 

The next day, not so much.

 

It was Toast’s day off, and Capable had a dentist appointment in the morning, so she would be late.  Furiosa did her best to realize that not everyone was as driven as she was and sometimes lives didn’t quite coordinate with days off and work as smoothly as wished.  She was on her own for morning feed and hay, and probably turn out, so she had also made sure there weren’t lessons until later in the day.  Then she managed to slice her hand open on a sharp edge of a SmartPak - of all the idiotic things - and found out she’d managed to run through all the bandaids in both the barn first aid kits and in her house.  She slapped a gauze pad over the cut and wrapped it with Vet Wrap, but the kits would have to be refilled again.  With the horses turned out, she decided to leave the stalls sit for a while, and jumped into her truck.  The store was all of a fifteen minute drive from the barn with traffic, and she made her purchases and left as quickly as possible; the cashier was new, and kept trying and failing not to stare at Furiosa’s custom prosthesis on her left arm and the bright pink wrap on her right hand.  That sort of behavior didn’t annoy her so much anymore, and she did derive a certain amount of perverse pleasure from freaking people out with it sometimes.  The prosthesis was, after all, fully functional and badass.

 

On the way back to the barn, her vet, Ace, called.  “I’ve got you down to update your Coggins on your show horses today.  Who you all got again?”

 

“Shit, that’s today?”  Even as she said the words, the reminder on her phone dinged. “Sorry, Ace, yeah.  We’ve got Bentley, CJ, Cash, and Reba.  I wish their owners would get on the barn schedule for vaccinations and Coggins, but no.  They have to do it their own way.  Sorry.  It’s been a morning already.”  She parked the truck, got her left arm through the loops of the shopping bag full of first aid supplies and stepped out, slamming the door behind her.  “See you at one, then.”  

 

“Yeah, about that, I’ve got an emergency run down at the other end of my territory.  Not sure how bad it is, or if it’s just an overly worried owner, but might be late.”

 

“Good luck with it.  I’ll be here all day, so when you get here, you get here.”

 

“Yup.”  

 

Ace ended the call and Furiosa shoved the phone into her pocket, hurrying back to the office.  The time registered in her head and she bit back a snarl.  The new guy should be here soon… she craned her head back to the parking lot and spotted an unfamiliar car.  Black, classic, muscle car.  Nope, the new guy was already here, and she hadn’t been around to meet him.  

 

“Shit.”  She turned the corner around the barn, and saw an unfamiliar man leading a very familiar miniature horse.  The flaxen sorrel mini was dancing all over, a lead rope looped over his neck and as she watched, the man tried to loop the loose end over the horse’s nose and back to make a crude halter.

 

“Fool!”  The word was the first thing out of her mouth, and she wasn’t quite sure after she said it, if she meant the mini or the man.  

 

Either way, both of them froze.  The mini, Pippin, recognized her voice and stood snorting.  The man looked as equally wild eyed and surprised.  Furiosa took a deep breath, assessed the scene, and raised an eyebrow.  

 

The man coughed and shuffled his feet, not quite making eye contact.  “He, mm, was out.  When I got here.  Caught him, before he got into trouble.”

 

“Hang onto him for a second.  I’ll go get a halter.”   She stepped into the office, tossed the grocery bag down and grabbed a mini halter from the hook behind the door.  There was only one mini on the farm, but there were tiny halters everywhere, for events such as this.  Pippin wandered at will when given the slightest chance.  Normally she wouldn't waste energy trying to catch him would let him go and catch him when he got hungry in the evening, but with Ace coming out later and the new guy starting, she wanted to keep everyone contained.  And Pippin was caught anyway.     

 

“Thank you,” she said as she rejoined the unlikely duo.  “I was in a rush this morning turning them out, who knows when he slipped past me.”  She slid the halter on and buckled it, keeping the cheek piece firmly in hand as she clipped the lead rope to it but left the end of the lead in the man’s hand.  Pippin sensed he’d been out numbered, and decided he could graze with the halter on just as easily as without it.  The man’s eyebrows quirked in confusion and he glanced a few times between the mini, his hand, and her, as if he couldn’t quite figure out why he was the one still holding the rope.    

 

She held out her hand.  “I’m the manager here.  Furiosa.”

 

“Mm…” he hesitated and eyed the pink vet wrap before taking her hand and trying to find a point where a firm grip wouldn’t hurt her injury further.  He managed it.  But he didn’t offer his own name in return.  

 

“Listen, neither Angharad or Joe managed to tell me anything about you, so I’d like to do a mini interview with you before we go over the barn and your duties and get you going today.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“You did well with Pippin there, normally he’s a hellion to catch once he’s out and it’s not feed time.”  

 

He mumbled a thanks and ducked his head again.  “You want him back in a paddock?”

 

“Yeah, he goes over in number five.”  She nodded towards the paddock behind him and started walking.  

 

Tugging gently on the rope to get the mini to stop grazing and walk, he followed behind.  

 

“Do you have a name?  They didn’t even tell me that.”

  
“Yeah.  Max.  M’name is Max.”    

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Take Your Fandom With You challenge ([here](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/carpooling) and [here](http://fadagaski.tumblr.com/post/137202387934/take-your-fandom-with-you-prompt)). 
> 
> This is rather heavily based on a couple barns I've worked at, though I was more in line with Capable or Toast in terms of what my job responsibility were. This is standing as a stand alone for the moment, though there is a chance I will expand it and head towards a resolution.


End file.
